Lilith Saintcrow

I’m under huge copyedit crunch, but it’s my day to post at the Deadline Dames. So, in honor of the occasion (if by “occasion” one means “feeling like my head is going to explode and that would be welcome because I would be DEAD and not worrying about these GODDAMN things”) here’s Five Bits of (Maybe Useless) Advice About Being a Working Writer:

5. No matter how much you love your book, be prepared to get sick of it. After at least two (sometimes as many as five or six or God forbid more) drafts, at least one (but likely more) revision letter(s), copyedits where some poor soul goes through and checks every damn comma, and proof pages where you search for typos, dropped words, and stets that didn’t make it through, you will become so fucking sick of this book you will want to stab it, pour petrol on it, light it, and stamp on it while singing a stabby-burny song and mutilating it afresh with your red-hot spurs of discontent. This is normal. If you can’t handle hating your own work or getting so sick of a project you literally want to put your fist through a brick wall (or someone’s head), this is not the career for you. Every goddamn job has aspects you won’t like. Finding the way to make them palatable is how we amuse the gods (and each other, most often on reality TV).

4. Your editor, your copyeditor, the Marketing folks, and the Production department are NOT your enemies. Your editor will tell you that parts of the work are weak and need to be fixed. Your copyeditor will make you feel like a goddamn fool by catching every punctuation error you ever thought of committing, plus a few you don’t even know how the hell happened. The Marketing folks will rub you the wrong way with cover copy, cover design, too much or too little publicity (or too much of the wrong publicity, or too little of the right publicity, or some other damn thing). Production will give you short turnaround dates, or piss you off in some way over something. This is normal. Working with other people is a goddamn hassle.

Get over it.

Editor, copyeditor, Marketing, Production–they have one goal. That is to make this book they’re working on right now the best book it can be. They are in the trenches at your side. They are your buddies, your comrades, your platoon. They may get on your nerves, but they are looking out for you the best way they know how, especially when the bullets come flying. It’s a feather in their caps when your book goes well. No matter how pissed off you are, remember they are not your enemies, that their priority is to make your book shine as much as it can, and they may see things you don’t. Don’t fire on them.

3. Sometimes you’ve got to turn the goddamn Internet off. Need I say more? I love Freedom. It was the best $10 I ever spent for my productivity.

What’s that? You in the back? What? But what if I need to research something while the Internet’s off? Mark it in the manuscript with a [[ thing I need to research ]] and move on. Get past it, and when you’re on the Net again, then look it up and search for [[ or ]] in your manuscript. Getting dragged into looking up the sex habits of Arctic flesh-eating bacteria is a slippery, slippery slope, my friends. You could lose days on that shit. (Or so I’ve heard.)

2. Decide on your stress tolerance early. Someone once told me that everyone has a certain tolerance for stress, and even if they arrange their lives to hit below that threshold, they will create shit to stress over until they hit the level they’re geared toward. “You don’t lower your stress,” he continued, staring into his bourbon. “You lower your tolerance.” Which was great advice, and I wish I’d thought to write down his phone number. Because he was pretty good-looking too, and he had a nice leather jacket.

Ahem. Anyway. Look not at your stress, young Padawans. Look at your tolerance, and see if you’re creating more stress for yourself by fretting over some aspects of your writing/writing career/whatever. Then start interrupting the stress-wave before it starts to build. Get up and dance, or something, scream at your computer, go for a skydive. Whatever works.

1. Give yourself some tiny rewards. I bargain with myself so often, it’s like I’m fricking Mephistopheles on crack trying to damn myself. “Set the timer. Ten minutes, and I can read the latest Girl Genius.” Or, “Fifteen more minutes, then you can roll on the floor with the dog and pretend you’re a poodle.” Or, “Another half-hour, and you can have a handful of Fritos.” Or, “Okay, Lili, if you get to 3K words, you can take the kids out for dinner so you don’t have to cook.” Or, “Get fifty pages of proofs out of the way and you can spend twenty minutes on Twitter making yourself look like an idiot.”

Hey, whatever works.

To consistently produce, I trick myself in a hundred little ways. I make it a game. I know my propensity for procrastination, but I don’t try to stop procrastinating–that’s impossible, and sets up a bound-to-fail diet mentality. Instead, I make the game all about rewarding myself for steady increments of work. I try to outwit myself. A certain amount of dragging my feet is necessary creative fuel, a sort of counterweight to my urge to go full speed ahead until I turn into a flaming wreck. Also, I enjoy the challenge of finding little ways to hoodwink myself, kind of like only focusing on the next three minutes on the treadmill. Each three-minute chunk adds up, and before I realize it I’ve run five miles.

So, give yourself teensy rewards. It really is all about tricking yourself into consistency.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve lingered long enough. I promised myself that if I could get this post written, I’d have earned a square of choco before I dive back into the copyedits. (See what I did there? SEE?)

Good luck, kids. Over and out.

My first review for Spiral Rhythms is up. I’m excited to be reviewing for them; it’s a good way to stretch my capabilities, and the editor’s a sweetheart. Go check ‘em out, if you like.

I’ve just finished eyeballing the two books in copyedit, back to back. Looking over CEs requires an entirely different set of mental muscles than writing, I’m feeling a bit bruised and strained right now. Plus I keep mumbling “stet, dammit, stet,” at weird times while my head jerks sideways. It’s like a tic, only not so nice. I am currently listening to Aretha Franklin wailing gospel and trying to calm the hyperventilation. I’ve two interviews and wordcount left to do today.

*weeps*

Of course, I’ve run errands and paid bills today, as well as delivered a care package to my favourite local bookstore. I ran three miles, took the dog on a two-mile hike, and loaded and unloaded the dishwasher twice. (I am gratified to report that I did NOT unload dirty dishes, as I have sometimes done while under deadline crunch.) I feel productive, but also slightly battered.

So that’s it from me today. I wish I had something Amazingly Relevant and Entertaining to report, but I got nothin’. My only amusement today has come from looking at the dog while paying bills and saying, “They’re right, Miss B. You CAN feel the Matrix when you do this!” and watching a frisky young squirrel trying to muscle his way up the backyard hierarchy. Neo is taking a Very Dim View of the latter event, indeed.

More later. Gotta run. Ciao.

The winners for the DEFIANCE contest are posted here at Deadline Dames! Thanks for all the great trivia–I learned an incredible amount reading those comments. My Readers have a vast store of knowledge. When I take over the world, I shall be depending on each of you to advise me.

My weekend was long periods of intense work broken only by moments of reaching for the next batch of Easter candy to shove down my gullet. Yes, that’s right–I was revising. Or, if you want to be precise, doing the first revision after an editorial letter for a book I wrote three years ago or so. I kept looking at the screen in disbelief, shaking my head and tasting vomit because I’d written something that sucked so hugely. Which is a normal thing for me during revisions, really, but looking at any work more than six months old is an incredibly disheartening experience. I take comfort in the fact that, while I might not know if I’ve gotten better in the intervening time, at least I know my writing style has changed.

This particular book started out at about 100K words, and now stands at about 125K. This is, for me, an absolute doorstop of a book. My editor wanted more more more, so I obliged, and since the work had good bones…well, I guess I’ll find out what she thinks in a little bit. Since I’ve finished and sent it back early, pleading for her to be only as savage with it as she must.

Notice I don’t ask for kindness. Kindness, while it may save whatever tattered shards of ego I have left, will not make the book better.

Anyway. I am looking forward to announcing this project as soon as I get the official okay-go-ahead. In the meantime, here, have some Chuck Wendig: 25 things a writer should know. I’ll just point and say, what he said.

After the push to get the revisions done (steady progress yesterday was marred by a corrupted file and the loss of an hour’s worth of work, thank God it wasn’t more, but it was in the last twenty fricking pages and I almost wept like the little girl I pretend to be sometimes when luring my victims in, whole ‘nother story, tell you later), catching up (mostly) on correspondence, and finishing a review that had been languishing on my hard drive for two weeks, I don’t have a lot of usable gray matter left in my tiny little skull. If you need me, I’ll be over in the corner rocking back and forth and reading about the Ardennes offensive. *whimpers*

Over and out.

I left the house without having coffee today. This was perhaps a mistake, but I was going so fast (long story, suffice to say I had shit to get done before 11AM) I didn’t have time. I chose a workout instead, which was probably a good thing. Anyway, I reached my last stop–a grocery store with a Starbucks–and decided to have someone else make me coffee.

I have rarely wished so hard for a taser in my LIFE.

When you’re got a line three people deep behind you at a Starbucks in a grocery store, you don’t start stacking sixteen different one-liter bottles of soda pop on the counter one. at. a. time. You especially don’t pause between each one to tell the poor girl behind the register what you like about the goddamn pop. You don’t insist that she ring them up in a specific order. And for Christ’s sake, when she’s trying to fix your bathtub of an iced drink, don’t lean your massive gut ON THE COUNTER and stuck your ass out while you root around in the pen cup by the register that’s clearly for employee use only. WTF, dude? Then, when she’s finished making your drink and clearly trying to call me over so I can get some goddamn caffeine in me, you should further not park in front of the register with your cart, attempting small talk with everyone, staring at her like you want to ask her out on a date. Here’s a clue: she’s not interested, neither am I, and a Starbucks line is possibly the most dangerous place on earth to pull these shenanigans. The people behind you are ADDICTED. You are between the junkies and their fix.

Hence, my wish for a taser. I kept muttering “No jury in the world would convict me.”

Of course, the fact that I was on semi-emergency footing, had a List of Things to Accomplish, and am a breath away from finishing a round of revisions on the last book in a series probably did not help. Today, my mantra is “Okay. Let’s get this bitch to Mount Doom.” (Which, by the way, is one more line to love Sarah Michelle Gellar for delivering so well.)

You don’t have to keep stepping backward. I’ve had some coffee. Really, I’m okay. *twitch* I’m not going to hurt anyone. *twitch twitch* Really, I’M ALL RIGHT.

Over and out.

The snowman my kids built with the neighbors is a congealed lump this morning, since the rain is coming down in sheets. Rain, thank goodness, not snow or freezing stuff. I like snow, don’t get me wrong. But the people around here go mad the instant there’s a flake or two on the road, not to mention the fact that I get freaking cold when the mercury drops below zero. Plus I was cranky, cold, and nauseous yesterday. It was only a mild stomach bug, but still. Dry heaving takes an enormous amount of energy out of one.

My semi-hiatus from blogging did me a lot of good. I got a lot of work done and was able to breathe a bit. Now I’m back in the fight, and it’s a good thing too. Under revision for two books, another book boiling in my brain–the creative muscles are totally different than the revision muscles, thank heavens–a Sekrit Project shaping up, review books coming in the mail, all sorts of Neat Stuff is about to happen. Now that I’ve rested a bit, I’m excited instead of terrified.

Well, maybe excited and terrified is a better way to put it.

The current thing taking most of my brain capacity is a read-through on a series to make sure I’ve tied up the loose ends I want to tie up, and left the ends I want dangling, dangling. Whenever I do this, I am amazed at some details. I remember writing certain passages, and others seem like they just fell out of my head. It’s a weird double-or-triple-or-more-vision to see the final form of something I spent so long soaking in and tweaking. Sometimes my notes (because I do take notes every time I’m forced to do a read-through) hold a smiley face, or a “That day was horrid, but I got some good writing in”, or “I REMEMBER THAT, IT HURT”. (That last one happens more often than you’d think.)

So today while the world drowns itself outside, I’ll be making notes on a legal pad and wincing in sympathy with one of my heroines. This will in all likelihood involve gallons of hot tea and several small snacks, some of which will be left uneaten as I wander away from them because I Have An Idea. I suspect watching me work on these sorts of days would provide a lot of amusement. You’ll have to just imagine it, though, since I refuse to install a webcam.

Over and out.